Louisiana Voice

On Wednesday of this week, I was eating dinner at a Denham Springs restaurant when two elderly couples entered the dining room. The message stenciled across the front of one of the men’s T-shirt immediately made my blood boil and had my wife not been with me, I probably would have some choice words for the cretin wearing the shirt.

Now, I am all about freedom of expression and as a general principle, am opposed to censorship of any description. But despite my belief in freedom of speech, I was immediately irate over the shirt’s message: DEFUND the MEDIA.

Whether he is aware of it or not (and he likely is oblivious), the media have already been defunded. Don’t believe it? Check the size of your local newspaper against what it was say, 10-15 years ago. Check the content of publications like The Shreveport Times, Monroe News-Star, Alexandria Town Talk, etc. to see what has happened to the print media. The New Orleans Times-Picayune ceased to exist after it had cut back to publishing three days a week. The Bastrop Enterprise shuttered its doors a few years back. Weekly and small dailies have been shrunken to mere shadows of their old selves – all because of defunding necessitated by the medium by which you are reading this: the Internet. So, I guess I am part of the problem but at least I never wanted to see newspapers die. That was, after all, the way I made my living for most of my adult life.

The old redneck is entitled to his opinion, but I have to wonder if he has ever considered what a world without the media might be like. Whether you agree with the message or not, it is critical that citizens of a democracy be kept informed about what their government is doing or not doing. The Washington Post‘s slogan, splashed across its masthead, proclaims, “Democracy dies in darkness.” LouisianaVoice‘s own masthead says, “It is understandable when a child is afraid of the dark but unforgivable when a man fears the light.”

You may not like the news you read (I deliberately omit TV news coverage because of the brevity of its stories, reduced as they are to 15-second soundbites). But as one reporter for the old Baton Rouge State-Times asked an irate caller during the hectic days of the Watergate scandal, “What have you learned about Richard Nixon that you’d rather not have known?”

Take, for example, the series of stories initiated by LouisianaVoice about an outfit in my hometown of Ruston: LASALLE CORRECTIONS. It all started with a whistleblower complaint that a LaSalle-run facility in GEORGIA was performing unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees.

On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it had instructed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to terminate its contract with two facilities that housed immigration detainees: the BRISTOL COUNTY (Massachusetts) Sheriff’s Office and the IRWIN COUNTY DETENTION CENTER in Ocilla, Georgia.

The Irwin County facility is the one operated by LaSalle against which the WHISTLEBLOWER COMPLAINT was lodged last September by Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.

Of course, the Georgia detention center is not the only troubled facility operated under the auspices of LaSalle. It pulled out of the TEXARKANA jail after numerous violations and lawsuits.

None of this would have ever come to light without the media.

As if those examples aren’t enough, there is the matter of RONALD GREENE and the Louisiana State Police.

Were it not for the dogged pursuit of this story, a gang of over-zealous state troopers in Monroe might never have been investigated for the death of Greene or the COVERUP that ensued.

Commenting on the release of the graphic video of Green’s final moments, Gov. John Bel Edwards lamented, “The entities that are doing the investigation, US Department of Justice and the District Attorney, haven’t yet completed the investigation. They renewed their request that the video not be made public, and that’s why the state police haven’t done it.”

Really, Governor? This occurred two years ago. How long does it take to conduct an investigation? George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police a year ago and the officer who held him down with his knee until he was dead was indicted, tried and convicted last month – 11 months after Floyd’s death. And we’re still “investigating” the Greene death two years later, with no indictments?

It’s bad enough that the state police are attempting to make this go away quietly without the state’s chief executive allowing himself to become complicit in the attempt.

State police have consistently refused to release the VIDEO of the tragic event, citing the same excuse as Edwards: that it was still “under investigation.” The media were asking for video of the apprehension, tasing, beating and ultimate killing of yet another black man who admittedly fled police who attempted to pull him over.

The source of the video is still unknown, but it was not from state police.

When Greene struck a tree, ending the chase, he exited his vehicle, saying, “I’m sorry” and “I’m scared.”

The ultimate lie, for which no one has yet been charged, was the claim by state police that Greene was killed in the auto accident, which the video clearly shows was not the case. That alone should be grounds for an obstruction of justice indictment.

That was a lie for which someone must be held accountable. But it’s been two years and the only trooper disciplined, subsequently was killed in a one-car collision, a victim, some say, of an apparent suicide after he had been given a termination letter from state police – 14 months after Greene’s death and only then because of media inquiries.

Two years is too damned long, but rest assured, without an aggressive media determined to get to the root of this story, it would have remained buried.

To the uninformed, obstinate, narrow-minded man who strutted so proudly through the restaurant in that T-shirt, a message: You can defund the media but when you do, you castrate democracy.